When Barbara Ehrenreich died earlier this year, I saw a lot of eulogizing about her important role as an advocate for the working class and tons of references to this book so I had to read it. I was really impressed by it. In the book, Ehrenreich describes the experience of working six different jobs in three places (she always needed two at once) to get by in Key West, Maine, and Minnesota. She faces huge difficulties and finds that it is either impossible or that she scrapes by only well enough that she could make it until a crisis came, at which point her savings would be wiped out. There is something patronizing about Ehrenreich engaging in “poverty tourism” but I think that is far outweighed by how important it is for her to be publishing this book. There is something incredibly valuable about a person bringing attention to the issues of working class people by stepping into their shoes, and it reminds me of a similar technique employed by Florida politician Bob Graham to work different jobs across the state.
Ehrenreich also observes that she
was certainly no better than anyone else for having a Ph.D. or experience as a
higher earners. Instead, she fits in normally with everyone and is perfectly
average at businesses full of low and high performers. Ehrenreich ends up
focusing on two white areas: Maine and Minnesota, because she realized in Key
West, which was more diverse, that she couldn’t get certain jobs because they
became reserved for certain ethnic groups. As a white woman in the restaurant business,
she was always moved to waitstaff in the front of the house, and she couldn’t
get a job as a housekeeper- those went to African-American women or
Spanish-speakers.
For all the
privations Ehrenreich was able to suffer through (which I don’t) such as living
in poor accommodations, eating rarely, and having to suffer through menial and difficult
labor, one thing she couldn’t do without was something I live without: a car. I
certainly don’t suffer in my life, but not having a car is such a huge divider
of people in America. So much of life requires a car, and Ehrenreich can’t even
avoid it. She mentions many times that it costs her a lot of money to keep the
car, but it keeps lots more jobs open to her in different places. At one point
she even references a Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard. In it, a
man crashes his car into a median and gets marooned in traffic. Unable to weave
through the never-ending cars, he is stuck surviving off of whatever happened
to be in his car.
I think that one of the best
observations the author makes (a few different times) is that managers just get
in the way of a good product or service a lot of the time. She writes, “Cooks
want to prepare tasty meals, servers want to serve them graciously, but
managers are there for only one reason—to make sure that money is made for some
theoretical entity, the corporation, which exists far away in Chicago or New
York, if a corporation can be said to have a physical existence at all.” This
is the loud sucking sound of money flying out of worker’s pockets and into
shareholder values. The managers can make more money for the company by improving
things, but they can also make more money by economizing, laying people off,
and making life miserable, and they often choose the latter. Whereas the maids
that the author works with want to do a good job, it is their manager who
encourages them to be quicker. He shows them training videos focusing them purely
on the visible grime that a customer can inspect, completely ignoring the most
important part of the job: actual sanitation and hygiene. The effect of the
manager-mindset pervades society-at-large. We cut public services for the poor
and invest more heavily in cops and prisons, condemning us to greater
inequality from which the only beneficiaries are usually the agents of
repression themselves.
The class
division has huge effects on women that Ehrenreich analyzes in depth (which is
probably because she is a woman). In one of the places she lives, her window is
right on a road, open to anyone’s view from outside if she wants any light. And
her lock doesn’t work too well, leaving her feeling vulnerable. Just having a
safe shelter is such a big deal. While working as a housekeeper, she works for
the wealthy alumna of an important women’s college. She sees in her client’s home
that the alumna is now spending time monitoring her investments and her baby’s
bowel movements. There are special charts for the baby, with spaces for time of
day, fluid intake, consistency, and color. There are books in the house about
pregnancy, breastfeeding, and everything involving the early years. While I
expected Ehrenreich to write about how disappointing it was for an accomplished
woman to be reduced to child-rearing, she saw it another way. Instead,
Ehrenreich compares her to Maddy, another housekeeper who struggles with childcare
and pays her sister-in-law to watch her toddler. Meanwhile, another of the
housekeepers is pregnant and inhaling cleaning chemical fumes all day long.
Ehrenreich writes, “Maybe there’s been some secret division of the world’s
women into breeders and drones, and those at the maid level are no longer
supposed to be reproducing at all. Maybe this is why our office manager, Tammy,
who was once a maid herself, wears inch-long fake nails and tarty little outfits
to show she’s advanced to the breeder caste and can’t be sent out to clean
anymore.” I found this to be harsh and somewhat sexist, but I can understand
the bitterness.
Some of the
most difficult things that Ehrenreich faces in her experience are the small
difficulties beyond low pay. She describes how difficult it is to change jobs
since each new job requires an application, an interview, and a drug test,
which requires a lot of running around town when you could be working. And the
whole application process works to grind you down. In fact, it is designed to
do so at places like Wal-Mart or other big corporations that have it down to a
science. When she works at Wal-Mart in Minnesota, Ehrenreich describes how the
hiring process never even gives her a point at which she can ask about her
wage. She just goes right from the application to orientation without any
discussion of the wage or a negotiation. The orientation is long and includes
significant portions bashing unions. Ehrenreich quotes the AFL-CIO ask saying
that ten thousand workers a year are fired for participating in union
organizing drives, always for minor infractions since they can’t be fired for
unionizing- that’s the reason for rules against profanity, which serve as a
good fig leaf. But it is amazing how even in the late 1990s, when Ehrenreich
was writing and the economy was supposedly good for workers in a tight labor
market, employers could still make applicants feel like supplicants.
As
Ehrenreich puts it, “Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in
good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely
support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics
to see that wages are too low and rents too high.” One problem with living in a
tight labor market is that once everyone is employed, wages rise, and housing
costs get higher. Unfortunately, official records don’t record housing costs
when calculating poverty, only taking the cost of food and multiplying it by
three to determine the poverty line. That’s a problem because in the 60s, when
the measure was adopted, food accounted for 24% of an average family budget and
housing was 29%. By 1999, food was only 16% of the average budget while housing
reached 37%. This is even worse for renters (the poor) because they don’t get
the large mortgage-interest deduction on their taxes that homeowners do. At the
time of publication, Ehrenreich cites an estimate from the Economic Policy
Institute that the living wage for a family of one adult and two children was
$30,000, or $14 an hour. This was calculated to include enough for health
insurance, a telephone, and childcare, but did not include going out to eat,
video rentals, internet access, cigarettes, wine, or very much meat. It is a
life of privation. And at the time of publication, 60% of American workers earned
less than that. It all comes down to some of the final words of the book, which
are probably the most famous that Ehrenreich has ever written:
When someone works for less pay
than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat
more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice to you, she
has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.
The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major
philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the
children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that
other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation
will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be
an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
Miscellaneous Fact:
- When Ehrenreich works as a waitress in Key West, she makes $2.43 an hour plus tips. I was blown away since this is still above the tipped minimum wage federally!! I am shocked we’ve gone almost a quarter century without an increase. Instead, it seems like the amounts that we tip have grown, now that the minimum prompt on the payment iPads is usually 20%.
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